Trump's 2018 Deregulatory Effort: 3,367 Rules, 68,082 Pages

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At year-end 2018, how is President Donald Trump’s regulatory reform project going?

Better than Obama, Bush II, and Clinton in terms of fewer regulations; but not as good as Trump’s own first year.

Let’s look at it. Monday, December 31, 2018, is the last federal workday of the year. That would seem obvious, but a partial federal shutdown on December 22 made clock-out earlier for some.

Nonetheless, a preliminary tally for Federal Register page and rule counts for Trump’s 2nd calendar year has appeared, even though “[d]uring the funding lapse, Federalregister.gov is not being supported."

The Number of Pages in theFederal Register

First, some perspective from a year ago; 2017 concluded with 61,308 pages under Trump; that was the lowest count in a quarter-century (since 61,166 pages under Bill Clinton in 1993). Former President Obama set the all-time record Federal Register with 95,894 pages in 2016.

It’s not as bad as it seems, though. While the Framers were unable to secure the blessings of liberty for posterity, the architects of the 20th century Administrative State have been able to secure a system of permanence for their successors. Rules and regulations cannot be revoked, only replaced by new ones under the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act’s public notice-and-comment process. (And things get even far more convoluted than that.)

Here’s the breakdown of both page counts and rules (which we’ll cover next) in the Register since 1989 under the first Bush. Despite the 2018 Trump-bump in pages, 2001 was the last time the count was lower than 2018.

After the National Archives processes all the blank pages and skips and archived the final 2018 Federal Register, Trump’s final count will wind up a bit lower.

Yes, the Federal Register’s bulk is a lousy gauge of regulation, but Washington doesn't go out of its way to honestly measure itself and disclose regulatory impact; and while everybody sings the song, cost-benefit analysis is the exception rather than the rule.

The Number of Rules and Regulations in the Federal Register

Under Trump, there has also been a substantial reduction in the number of rules and regulations published within all those Federal Register pages.

Back in the 1990s, rule counts were regularly over 4,000, as seen nearby. Even Obama’s exit count of 3,853 was below those stratospheric levels. Of course, not all rules are created equal and rules comprising fewer pages can weigh more than lengthy ones.

Obama’s own lowest count was 3,410, not much more than Trump’s new score. But fewer of Obama’s rules would be expected to have been devoted to rollbacks of prior initiatives, the emphasis of Trump’s “one-in, two-out” executive order.

Even without congressional action Trump made significant strides in regulatory streamlining (regulatory reform passed the House but could never get through the Senate in the now-shuttering 115th Congress). There are exceptions to that, of course, that I’ll cover another day.

For now, since a rule has to be written to get rid of a rule, Federal Register and rule counts can both grow even in a deregulatory environment, unless Congress short-cuts the process with reform legislation.

Trump also needs to tweak Federal Register reporting so that proposed and final rules are each explicitly deemed either “Regulatory” or “Deregulatory,” which would make next year’s roundup more informative.